Surprise

75 Years Ago Today

I fear that for many young Americans the word "Guadalcanal" means nothing.
Guadalcanal is an island in the Solomons named after a village in the province of Seville, Spain. The island was named by the Spanish explorer Álvaro de Mendaña in 1568, for the village which was the birthplace for a member of Mendaña's expedition.

In 1942 this island was the scene for the beginning of the end of the Japanese Empire.

At Guadalcanal, the Empire of Japan lost two-thirds of their 31,000-plus army troops committed to the fight. Approximately 1,600 Americans were killed. Warship losses were roughly equal, but the Japanese would never equal American industrial ability to replace them and so felt the loses more significantly. Most devastating to the Japanese was the decimation of their elite naval aviators. From this, they would never recover. The most shocking of American losses was the over 5,000 U.S. sailors and Naval officers killed, a figure that easily surpassed the Navy’s accumulated losses in all her history.

More here.

NOTE: Guadalcanal was a crucial victory as it is only a three hour flight from this island to Brisbane, Australia. Japanese airfields would have made transportation form the US to its ally very difficult.

73 Years Ago Today

Tourists, not troops, now cover the beaches of Normandy.

Story and more pics here.

Loyce Edward Deen

November 5, 1944

A WWII Navy gunner is buried at sea in the plane he was killed in.

A Grumman TBF Avenger torpedo bomber of VT-15 Torpedo Air Group, approaches and lands on the deck of the USS Essex (CV-9) during the Battle of Manila Bay, in World War II.

Upon landing, Lt. Robert Cosgrove (Pilot) and Sailor Digby Denzek (Radioman) can be seen in their respective forward and middle crew positions.

But the rear gunner position, occupied by Aviation Machinist Mate 2nd Class, Loyce Edward Deen (Gunner) has been completely destroyed by enemy 40mm shell fire. AMM 2C Deen was decapitated as a result.

As the aircraft is parked amongst others, with wings folded, sailors of the Essex take fingerprints and cut dog tags from the body of AMM2C Loyce Deen in the gunner position.

Captain Carlos W. Wieber, Commanding Officer of the Essex, and her crew, participate in funeral services on the deck. A chaplain conducts the services from beside the aircraft, where Loyce Deen’s remains in the gunner’s position have been shrouded.

More here.

UK Chastises Kerry For Kicking Israel When They're Down, But Only After They're Through Kicking Israel In The Balls

What the hell is wrong with the UK?  Freaking treacherous bastards...
From Reuters:

Britain scolded U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry for describing the Israeli government as the most right-wing in Israeli history, a move that aligns Prime Minister Theresa May more closely with President-elect Donald Trump.

After U.S. President Barack Obama enraged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by refusing to veto a UN Security Council resolution demanding an end to Israeli settlement building, Kerry's public rebuke of Israel has unsettled some allies such as Britain.

[...]While Britain voted for the UN resolution that so angered Netanyahu and says that settlements in the occupied territories are illegal, a spokesman for May said that it was clear that the settlements were far from the only problem in the conflict.

But that's nothing out of the ordinary; England has been screwing Israel even before it was a nation. The Brits allowed only 1500 Jews per month to enter Palestine after the end of WWII and violated the terms of their own Palestinian Mandate wherein Great Britain ruled Palestine. The Brits blockaded almost all Jewish refugee ships trying to deliver desperate Jews to Palestine and also turned over fortified positions and munitions to the Arab League when they exited Palestine in 1948 so the Arabs could end the Jewish Question by slaughtering them.

Twin Boom Aircraft Of WWII

Fw 189

P-38

But we did it better. Both planes were first flown within a year of each other. The Fw-189 in 1938 and the P-38 in 1939.

The Focke-Wulf Fw 189 Uhu ("Eagle Owl") was a very successful Luftwaffe reconnaissance aircraft used extensively in the Eastern Front. It was unarmed, could carry a 3 man crew, had a combat radius of 420 miles and top speed of less than 250 mph but was extremely maneuverable. It could avoid being shot down by Soviet fighters simply by flying in very tight circles. The Soviets called it "The Frame" because of it's box like silhouette in the sky. About 850 of these aircraft were produced. There is only one in existence today.

Lockheed's P-38 "Lightning" was a heavily armed, 400+ mph fighter. It could also carry two 1,000 bombs and with drop tanks it could be flown across the Atlantic, eliminating the need for transport by ocean born freight.The German Luftwaffe called it "Der Gabelschwanz Teufel" (The Fork-Tailed Devil). It was that good. It was the first USAAF fighter to be delivered to the RAF under its own power. With a range of 2,500 miles, it was the most important fighter in the Pacific Theater.

Japanese mastermind Adm. Yamamoto was killed by a P-38 that shot down his transport plane. Of course the US Navy had broken the Japanese military cypher codes by then so the P-38's had a good idea where he would be. Lockheed manufactured over 1,000  of these fighters in variants up to the P-38L. The Air Force retired the Lightning in 1949.

Hacksaw Ridge

Mel Gibson's new movie, "Hacksaw Ridge," is a about an actual WWII conscientious objector, Desmond Doss, who enlists, becomes a medic and earns a Medal of Honor saving lives at Okinawa. It features performances by Andrew Garfield, Sam Worthington, Luke Bracey, Teresa Palmer, Hugo Weaving, Rachel Griffiths and Vince Vaughn.

Of course since Gibson is directed the film there are political considerations that must be examined by leftist Hollywood critics.

From Variety:

Mel Gibson has made a movie about a pacifist who served nobly during WWII. It's a testament to his filmmaking chops, and also an act of atonement that may succeed in bringing Gibson back.

Mel Gibson’s “Hacksaw Ridge,” which premiered today at the 73rd International Venice Film Festival, is a brutally effective, bristlingly idiosyncratic combat saga — the true story of a man of peace caught up in the inferno of World War II. It’s the first movie Gibson has directed since “Apocalypto,” 10 years ago (a film he’d already shot before the scandals that engulfed him), and this November, when it opens with a good chance of becoming a player during awards season, it will likely prove to be the first film in a decade that can mark his re-entry into the heart of the industry. Yet to say that “Hacksaw Ridge” finally leaves the Gibson scandals behind isn’t quite right; it has been made in their shadow. On some not-so-hard-to-read level, the film is conceived and presented as an act of atonement.

At the end of the article there are comments that introduced sanity and brought clarity to the entire written piece.

beenaroundyaknow says: 

The only persons that Hollywood forgives for anything they’ve done are liberal politicians and especially the Clintons.. And your recent crop of films are all crap and failing miserably at the box office, except for animated movies. One would think you’d figure it out but you’re all too damn stupid.

1. postalman says: 

   Did Roman Polanski ever atone for child rape?
   
   Ben (@benwedgie) says: 

   Hollywood, listen up. Start reading comments on articles like this. You will find that you are NOT supported by most in your “progressive” actions and “political correctness.” The thinking public is on to you.

   Justsomeguy says:
   Precisely. If Gibson was a loyal left wing liberal, whose comments were directed at conservatives, George Bush and Israel, Hollywood would have yawned. But Gibson (whose drunken tirades were certainly obnoxious) is forever guilty, in their eyes.
   Try this one on for size, Hollywood: “At this point, what difference does it make?”
   At least Gibson’s foolish statements and judgement never got any Americans killed. 

Hollywood just doesn't get it. Never will.

Just A Flesh Wound

Looks like a Sherman tank crew got lucky.

H/T Daily Time Waster

Somewhere in Nazi germany - Spring 1945

The little guy is my father-in-law, John DiBello.

At 5' 1/2"he was the smallest guy in his outfit. When he arrived at his unit, one soldier exclaimed, "Christ, they're sending us children." He participated in the invasion of Germany with the 3rd Army and fought right through Germany. In April 1945 he celebrated his nineteenth birthday somewhere southeast of Berlin. On VE Day his armored unit was in Czechoslovakia. They had run into a bunch of Russians and had to stop.

Dad never talked about killing Germans. He told stories about sleeping in sinks in abandoned farm houses and grabbing chickens from angry farmers - they always seemed to outrun the field messes.

He was strafed by a ME-262, a German jet fighter. They didn't have the foggiest notion what it was when it flew over head but knew it wasn't theirs. It came back and blew up a halftrack.

When the war ended he didn't have enough points to go home. The Army told him that they were going to send him back to the States for a few weeks and then ship him to the Pacific. He told the sergeant, "You send me home and you'll never see me again."

He found himself in LaHavre waiting to be shipped back to England. So he did what any self respecting Italian-American would do under those circumstances ... he opened up a black jack table in his tent and sent the money home to his mother. She was able to put a down payment on a house on Syracuse's North side.


Scariest people he met during WWII: driving a jeep one night he got lost near the front delivering a message and ran into some North African troops. Perhaps Moroccans. He thought they were going to eat him.That and the Hitler Youth, little stinking fanatics shooting at GI's even though the war was lost.

In England he was the mess sergeant for a German Wehrmacht POW camp. He was issued a .45 but carried it unloaded. In his words - the war was over. Dad and the Germans just wanted to go home. The krauts liked him, called him Kleine Sergeant - the Little Sergeant. On his way home on a liberty ship he threw the .45 overboard. Never touched another gun.

He returned home in June of 1946, walked in the house his mother had bought and ... no one home. A neighbor told him his family was at a wedding. So he went to the reception and just walked in. The surprise almost killed his mother.

Dad died in 2007 in the VA hospital here in Syracuse. He was 81.

General Patton's Speech

I still think he was murdered.

Thank God Eisenhower Was A Republican

From iOTW:

Labour MP Jo Cox has been shot and killed in an attack in West Yorkshire today.

The 41-year-old mother of two was shot three times and stabbed just before 1pm in Birstall in her Batley & Spen constituency.

She was pronounced dead around an hour later, leaving her husband Brendan and two young children, aged 3 and 5.

West Yorkshire Police have arrested a 52-year-old man, named locally as Tommy Mair.

Her assailant is claimed to have shouted ‘Britain First’ as he walked away from her lying in a pool of blood.

As for the use of a gun against this woman, look no further than Chicago or Detroit to see the efficacy of gun control legislation. The odds of a young black male getting shot in either of these two cities is about the same as a 19 yr old white male on Omaha Beach. Thank God Ike wasn’t a Democrat else we’d still be there.

Seventy-Two Years Ago

RIP USAAF Master Sgt. Melvin Rector

After 70 year absence, a 94 year old WWII vet dies upon his return to England.

U.S. Air Force Master Sgt. Melvin Rector long carried Britain in his heart after he helped defend it during World War II, but 70 years passed without him stepping foot in the country.

The 94-year-old finally decided to leave his home in Barefoot Bay, Fla., to visit Britain earlier this month. The National World War II Museum in New Orleans conducts a travel program through which interested parties can visit certain sites of the war. He signed up for one, in hopes of visiting the Royal Air Force station Snetterton Heath, in Norfolk.

He served there with the 96th Bomb Group in 1945 as a radio operator and gunner on B-17 Flying Fortress bombers, flying eight combat missions over Germany during the spring of the war’s final year. On four of these missions, his plane came under heavy fire. One almost proved catastrophic, and the plane returned to base with holes dotting its wings.

Rector was excited for his return to the place that made this great plane famous.

Story here.

Note: In the early 1970's I worked with a dispatcher who was a B-17 tail gunner during WWII.

Airman Bill Hart's B-17 was shot down in early 1944 on only his second combat mission; he spent the rest of the war in a German POW camp.

I asked Bill about his experiences and he said the Germans didn't treat the Americans and Brits too badly; the German prison camp guards didn't have it very easy either due to food and fuel shortages. But what they did to the Russian POW's was terrible.

Bill was an easy going soul, very conscientious worker but his health was poor. He blamed it on the prison camp and died several years after I worked with him.

Myths Of American Armor

The Sherman M4 got a bad rep... undeservedly. This is a very interesting video if you're into WWII history.

Listen to this US Army armor officer/historian; the M4 was an excellent weapon and did exactly what it was designed to do.

The Mighty M1911: Legendary .45 Pistol

Wow, during World War II, a USAAF bomber is shot down by Japanese fighters over Burma. Several crew members are killed while parachuting to safety .... except for one.

On March 31, 1943, when they were stationed in British India, Baggett’s squadron was ordered to destroy a bridge at Pyinmana, Burma. But before reaching their target, the B-24 bombers were intercepted by Japanese fighter planes. Baggett’s plane was badly hit, and the crew were ordered to bail out. The Japanese pilots then attacked U.S. airmen as they parachuted to earth.

Two of Baggett’s crew members were killed, and Baggett, though wounded, played dead, hoping the Japanese would ignore him. One Zero approaching within several feet of Baggett, then nose-up and in an almost-stall, the pilot opened his canopy. Baggett shot at the pilot with his .45 calibre pistol. The plane stalled and plunged to the earth, with Baggett becoming legendary as the only person to down a Japanese airplane with a M1911 pistol.

The co-pilot of that B-24, Owen John Baggett (August 29, 1920 – July 27, 2006), was a second lieutenant in the United States 7th Bomb Group based at Pandaveswar, in India, during the Second World War.

More about this amazing story here, here and here:

Victory At Sea

I grew up watching "Victory At Sea" serials.

My dad joined that Navy in 1943 at the age of 17. He became a hard hat diver and served in both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. I remember something he told me when I was about 12 years old;  he said, "Just before the torpedo hits, get up on your toes else the force of the explosion coming up from below the deck will break your ankles."

I think he had been drinking and remembered how it felt when his ship was sunk by a Japanese submarine.

Help Me Out

Not sure if this is the German city of Freiburg im Breisgau after the Allies crossed the Siegfried Line in 1944, or the American city of Detroit after the Tigers beat the Padres in 1984.

The Last Man

The last American combat death in WWII occurred on August 18, 1945, when two US Army Air Corps bombers were attacked by Japanese fighters. The bombers were on a mission to verify Japanese compliance with the terms of the cease fire which the Emperor had announced on August 15th.

Sergeant Anthony J. Marchione—a 20-year-old aerial gunner in the U.S. Army Air Forces—bled to death in a bullet-riddled B-32 Dominator bomber in the clear, bright skies above Tokyo. The young man from Pottstown, Pennsylvania, has the dubious distinction of being the last U.S. service member to die in combat in World War II.

American GI's were still being killed a year or more after the war ended, but these deaths were caused by rouge guerrilla units/individuals who refused to surrender.

The B-32 is not widely known as an American combat aircraft as were the B-17, B-24 and the B-29 bombers.

The Consolidated B-32 Dominator (Consolidated Model 34) was a heavy bomber made for United States Army Air Forces during World War II, and had the distinction of being the last Allied aircraft to be engaged in combat during World War II. It was developed in parallel with the Boeing B-29 Superfortress as a fallback design should the B-29 prove unsuccessful. The B-32 only reached units in the Pacific during mid-1945, and subsequently only saw limited combat operations against Japanese targets before the end of the war. Most of the extant orders of the B-32 were cancelled shortly thereafter and only 118 B-32 airframes of all types were built.

Source.

Putin's Panties In A Wad

The Rooskies are in a lather after the Poles decided to destroy a Soviet WWII memorial. BTW, it was on Polish soil.

Like my ex-wife, the Rooskies have a very convenient memory when it comes to events that they'd rather forget. Especially when it relates to massacres:

MOSCOW/WARSAW (Reuters) - Russia said on Saturday it was outraged by Poland's destruction of a Soviet war monument, warning Warsaw of the "most negative consequences" after what it said was a flagrant violation of an agreement between the two countries on protecting memorial sites.

Poland has been one of the most vocal critics of Russia's annexation of Ukraine's Crimea peninsula in 2014. Russia and Poland share a history of conflicts and the disagreement over war memorials is likely to add to tensions.

[...]Authorities in the western Polish town of Nowa Sol took down the brotherhood-in-arms of Polish and Red Army soldiers memorial at the end of June, reducing it to a pile of rubble.

Apparently a little walk in the Katyn Forest for an estimated 22,000 Polish soldiers and civilian slipped the Rooskies' minds.

One of the earliest--and certainly the most infamous--mass shootings of prisoners of war during World War II did not occur in the heat of battle but was a cold-blooded act of political murder. The victims were Polish officers, soldiers, and civilians captured by the Red Army after it invaded eastern Poland in September 1939. Strictly speaking, even the Polish servicemen were not POWs. The USSR had not declared war, and the Polish commander in chief had ordered his troops not to engage Soviet forces

 

 So much for the celebrated "Brotherhood-in-Arms of Polish and Red Army Soldiers."

At the end of WWII, the Soviets were so embarrassed by their Katyn indiscretion that for the next 50 years they blamed it on the Nazis and forbade any mention of it in Poland.

Katyn was a forbidden topic in postwar Poland. Censors suppressed all references to it. Even mentioning the atrocity meant risking reprisal. While Katyn was erased from Poland's official history, it could not be erased from historical memory. In 1981, Solidarity erected a memorial with the simple inscription "Katyn, 1940." Even that was too much. The police confiscated it. Later, the Polish Government, on cue from Moscow, created another memorial. It read: "To the Polish soldiers--victims of Hitlerite fascism--reposing in the soil of Katyn."

Doesn't that remind you of Hillary's accusations against the maker of that infamous anti-Islam video after the Benghazi debacle?  Perhaps Hillary was channeling her inner Stalin.

In 2010 President Putin delivered a half-assed apology of kinds in a ceremony commemorating the victims but it fell far short of what the Poles wanted. Putin's words were:

“... it would also be a lie and manipulation to place the blame for these crimes on the Russian people.”

*cough***bullshit!***cough*

To this day the Russians have refused to release all Soviet era documents relating to the Katyn Forest massacre.

The Polish Foreign Ministry stated that their agreement only extended to cemeteries and did not include monuments; the Mayor of Nowa Sol had this to say:

“The monument was large (dozen tonnes of concrete), ugly, always dirty with rust leaking out of the abyss of its emptiness, like blood or tears,” Wadim Tyszkiewicz, Nowa Sol’s mayor said on his Facebook profile earlier this week.

FTR - The victims were transported from Soviet-occupied eastern Poland to Byelorussia where they were exterminated. It is estimated that over 300,000 Poles were seized by the Russians and relocated or murdered. Nowa Sol is in western Poland near the border with Germany.

 

source

Sinking Of The HMS Barham

Dramatic Newsreel footage captured the sinking of the Queen Elizabeth Battleship. A salvo of torpedoes from a German submarine struck from close range on HMS Barham on November 25, 1941 in the Mediterranean. Within four minutes, the battleship had listed over to Port and the ships magazines had exploded, sinking the battleship and killing 863 men. The terrifying explosion was caught on film by Pathe cameraman John Turner who was on an adjacent ship.